Kathleen Booth was a British computer scientist and mathematician who co-wrote the first assembly language and co-designed the assembler and autocode for the earliest computer systems at Birkbeck College, University of London. From 1947 to 1953 she helped build three machines there, the ARC (Automatic Relay Calculator), built with fellow research assistant Xenia Sweeting, the fully electronic SEC (Simple Electronic Computer), and APE(X)C; her contribution included the ARC assembly language itself. She later worked at the University of Saskatchewan and Lakehead University in Canada and was an early pioneer of machine translation research. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Kathleen Booth
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FAQs
Why is Kathleen Booth credited with the first assembly language?
She wrote the software for the ARC2 and SEC machines and invented Contracted Notation, which became known as assembly language.
At Birkbeck College she wrote all the software for the ARC2 and SEC machines, and in the process invented what she called Contracted Notation. Through evolution and contributions by others, that language is today known as assembly language. Sources therefore credit her with writing the first assembly language, with the later development shared among others.
Did Kathleen Booth work on machine translation?
The Birkbeck computer laboratory she worked in gave a public machine translation demonstration on 11 November 1955.
Yes. Kathleen Booth directed the development of suitable programs for translation at Birkbeck. On 11 November 1955 the Birkbeck computer laboratory gave a public demonstration of machine translation.
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Associated With
Credit for the first assembly language is disputed: Booth's 1947 ARC coding is the earliest documented instance, but the term assembler is usually credited instead to Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill's 1951 book, and similar schemes arose independently elsewhere in the same period.
Source Wikipedia: Kathleen Booth
In Field
Source Wikipedia: Kathleen Booth
Invented
Source Wikipedia: Assembly language
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Nationality
Also in Geography Atlas: the nationality of this subject.
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Kathleen Booth
Wikimedia FoundationLead section
Kathleen Hylda Valerie Booth (née Britten, 9 July 1922 - 29 September 2022) was a British computer scientist and mathematician who co-wrote the first assembly language and co-designed the assembler and autocode for the first computer systems at Birkbeck College, University of London.
- Associated With: Assembly Language, Career section
- In Field: Programming Language Theory, Lead paragraph
View the Source Wikidata: Kathleen Booth
Wikipedia: Assembly language
WikipediaInvented: Assembly Language, Lead sectionQuote, Invented: Assembly Language, Lead section
The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in Andrew Donald Booth and Kathleen H.V. Britten's 1947 work, Coding for A.R.C.
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